This post is part-9 of a series of ten essays on the essence of work. For an introduction and overview of previous posts, check here.

Geert Degrande is a Flemish writer, author, translator, journalist, listener, and innovator. We met in 2009 as part of my personal self-discovery journey. Geert was a witness of the coming-out ceremony at the end of that journey. It was also the start of this blog in April 2009 with “Singing my own song”.

Begin 2015, Geert introduced me to Fabiaan Van Vrekhem, who was working with Geert on a book about disruption. To be honest, I was a bit suspicious, as after all these years, i have seen so much abuse of the buzzwords innovation and disruption.

We met for a coffee in Fabiaan’s offices in Brussels on a warm spring day in April 2015, almost day on day 6 years after my first blog post, I only realize now.

The connection was genuine and immediate. We had a long conversation about the essence of work and different levels of quality awareness.

I got hooked when the conversation went into the topic of letting go: those moments in your work maturation, where you are not interested anymore, because you want to move on to the next level. Where you delegate the execution of certain tasks to professionals.

I am just back from delivering a great edition of Innotribe at Sibos, where I had the pleasure of working with professionals from George P. Johnson and Collective Next.

Those professional are so good: they give me piece of mind that the work will be performed as imagined by its architect and curator. Where art and content and flawless execution meet and create a superior experience.

Innotribe anchor person Akhtar Badshah with his own artwork in the background.

It is the result of months of build-up, co-creation and co-ideation; it is the moment to “let go”. And I have to confess I find it still difficult to let go.

Letting go is also my challenge when doing my artwork.

Leaving room for unplanned encounters.

As many of you know, I have gone back to artschool. Last year drawing: painting this year. Discovering the difference between drawing in lines and thinking in shapes and layers. Where the best discoveries happen unexpectedly.

Study book Petervan – unplanned encounters of stuff – 2015

As part of the studywork, I dived into this great book about artists. And I had to think again about the layers of quality so well described in Fabiaan’s book.

Letting go and delegate, like artist Jeff Koons in Sarah Thornton “33 Artists in 3 Acts”, where she describes the artist employing a staff of 150 people in his studio to execute his creations by the best craftsmen.

“Artists have become ideas people liberated from manual labor; they can delegate without compromising their authorship.”

The book is about letting go, delegating when not being interested anymore. And moving on to the next level of quality awareness. It’s a deep book about different levels of ambition and life quality.

The 7 dimensions of value creation – courtesy Fabiaan Van Vrekhem

A good example of “letting go” is when you for example reached valuable craftsmanship. You move to the next level of value creation “service” and let the quality control craftsmen come in. Your interventions are now about service. As you mature in the essence of your work, you work yourself naturally up on the value layers.

Layers 1-4 are all about context management. That’s what many companies are good at.

Layers 5-7 are about context creation. That’s what not many companies are good at.

To go back at the start of this series on The Essence of Work, management and creation are different belief systems.

If you are already in context creation mode within an organization that is struggling in the context management mode, it is a source of frustration, for members of either belief system.

Again, the one is not better than the other. Trying to solve the problem as WE see it. This is coming back to Dave Gray’s belief systems: “as we/they see it”

The maturation is in the move

from “span of control”

to “span of support”

Making interventions at the 7th dimension, the dimension of societal progress – is about meaning-making. This is the dimension of societal context, the dimension of sense-making:

We are prepared to pay more for meaning than for matter

The 7th Dimension is to become a source of influence to make people aware on how to interact. This is where “let other see what I see” comes in: let others discover what they can see if they become multi-sensory sensitive and aware.

This becomes even more important in a world that is moving fast, in a world full of uncertainties.

The methods of planned certainties

don’t work anymore in an uncertain world.

The more uncertainty, the more unknowns.

You cannot solve the unknown with the known, you can only solve the unknown with what you become aware of, and that is consciousness.

People are on a growing curve. Because they have a certain potential capability present, they look for more information, more data so they can use their capability at the full.

The organization has to become “aware” of this learning-progress-maturation need of their collaborators.

This is different from “I look for a job where I can learn”: that is in essence is an egocentric desire, where the individual wants to suck more knowledge (aka value) out of the system that he/she contributes. The maturity happens when that person starts to realize that a balanced caring life is more about putting value back into the system.

How many levels can your organization integrate to create a potential context machine for your collaborators?

When people outgrow their role, they get frustrated because of the unused potential. They are determined by responsibilities that no longer fit their level of capability.

As we have seen, Fabiaan describes 7 layers of value creation.

I would claim there is another level.

Where it is about pure beauty. The sort of beauty that is not of this world. The sort of beauty that only can be captured in ballet, or in poetry, or in multi-sensory performances.

Theatre de Chaillot in Paris on May 2. (ALAIN JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images)

There is a word for that, I discovered recently: ETHEREAL

Ethereal means “extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world.”

According to the company, the mechanical chef, which incorporates 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors, learns how to cook by watching a plain old human chef, whose movements are turned into commands that drive the robot hands. Moley hopes to eventually create a product that can do everything from preparing the ingredients to cleaning up the kitchen, and include a built-in refrigerator and dishwasher. The idea is to support the robot with thousands of app-like recipes, and it would allow owners to share their special recipes online.

It suddenly dawned to me that

making dinner is a matter of attention.

And that “they” – the robot tribes – don’t get it. As we have seen already in our series’ post about belief systems, “They don’t get it” is a strong indicator of living in a different belief system.

Peter Goossens - Hof Van Cleve

Let’s contrast this with the craftsmanship of Peter Goossens and his team, who are running Hof Van Cleve, one of the best restaurants in the world. Best like in world-class: a 3-star Michelin and much more, bringing them into the top-25 of the world.

“In order to cook at the highest level every day and guarantee an exceptional experience for our guests, it is important that the interior of our restaurant exudes the same traditional spirit and identity that our kitchen does. Our preparations are, after all, in my opinion, the result of a great deal of effort at all levels. Indeed, we handle the best local products that the gardeners, farmers, growers, fishermen, hunters and cheese refiners can provide. Out of respect for their passionate work and thanks to their fantastic ingredients, we are able to provide our guests with a unique culinary experience. This makes cooking a true craft.”

You can take this wonderful definition of the Essence of Work, and apply it to your own domain. Note the emphasis on guests, tradition, respect, experience, and craft.

Cooking is much more than executing a recipe.

The essence of work is much more

than building to spec

In “The world beyond your head… “, there is a great chapter about a small family-run business that is specialized in restoring and building from scratch old baroque organs.

A New Organ for Anabel Taylor Chapel

Like Peter Goossens, these organ builders don’t content themselves with restoring or building to spec. What they aim for is a dramatically superior musical experience by the musician who will play the organ.

Tradition is about building on the shoulders of giants, a bit of a simplistic statement. The author goes at length to “craft” deep into the meaning of tradition, to internalize tradition, and to pass it on in your work and onto next generations.

Tradition

is not seen as non-authentic,

but a source for energized work.

“Unlike a space shuttle, the pipe organ is a species that comes to us through cultural traditions, and serves aesthetic purposes that would be unintelligible without reference to those traditions.”

“the historical inheritance of a long tradition of organ making seems not to burden these craftspeople, but rather to energize their efforts in innovation.”

What is driving these people to strive for unconditional excellence? Wouldn’t it be easier to componentize and modularize the different elements of work and cast them in a repeatable process, so we can be more efficient and produce more at less cost? Yes, that would be possible, but I think some of us don’t get excited anymore by the efficiency game and we are aiming for a higher quality and awareness of quality of our work and the experience it delivers to our customers, or should I call them “guests”?

“There were also electronic organs available. But there’s a part of the population that will only take this.

“It’s a totally handcrafted, handmade object, and some people are willing to pay an enormous premium for it. They realize the performance musically is superior. And that’s the only justification.”

“We’re weird: we’re trying to make a living, for one thing, and make this whole thing practical, so we have to make the parts in good order and build to the contract price, which is an insane thing to do for what we’re producing, and we have to make something that’s going to perform technically or our customers are going to be coming back and getting on us. At the same time the ethos of the instrument has to be authentic—that’s why people are paying big money for us to do the work. So we’re jammed in the cracks, trying to make a realistic business out of this and at the same time be as authentic as we can. The thread of what we’re doing is totally authentic.”

The author leads us into two criteria that are essential for the Essence of Work:

Historical coherence: The work is enlivened by a sense of going further on a trajectory they have inherited.

Musicality: Timeless standards of engineering, specifically as they contribute to musicality.

So, we are getting into something called

“The timeless demands of musicality.”

Wow! This is getting pretty close to Christopher Alexander’s “Timeless way of building” and his passion for “pattern languages”, much more profound ways of communicating, integrating, and passing on of patterns of tradition and craftsmanship.

How would you define “musicality” in your work, even if your work has nothing to do with organs or music?

I would now like to mix-in two other criteria for our Essence of Work:

Constraints: Constraints have to do a lot with craftsmanship, tradition, and musicality.

Authentic observation: perceiving as a baby does, liberated from conventionality

Constraints. Good work is usually performed within the boundaries of timeless tradition and qualities. You have to respect the scheme, the pitch, tone, the rhythm and other musical traditions to create the right “musical experience”. Very well trained musicians, who have superior mastery of their instruments, and respect the tradition canvas of conventions, usually perform a good jazz jam.

The Essence of Work is about producing a good jazz jam. Grounded and building upon the conventions and traditions of the thousand of years before us.

The other “constraint” is the audience: the public, the commissioner, the customer, the guest. Where the context of the host and the guest meet, where host and guest get into a dance, not a fight. Host and guest: much better than the transactional supplier and buyer, or producer and consumer.

Architecture is not at all about letting your imagination go. You must confront your imagination again and again with the request and desire of your customer

Then there is “authentic observation”.

In my art classes last year, I learned to observe. To draw what I see and not to draw what I think. This has helped me a lot to get the basics more or less right: arms and legs in the right proportion vis-à-viz the body, that sort of basics. I only got a feel for the basics. Much more work to before i am getting any good at it, let’s not even think yet about mastery or even mystery. It’s still something very tactical, mechanical for me. So much more to learn.

This week-end the 2015-2016 art class started.

Picture of my art class – season 2015-2016

I will try painting this year. I never did painting, never worked with color. I am completely novice here, and open and receptive to anything that comes my way. No clue what will happen. No plan in mind.

It was thus a happenstance when my art teacher showed this as the main guiding principle for this academy year:

We were asked to “observe”, to look through a frame and let ourselves surprise by the shapes in the frame. Just see. But it is more than non-judgmental observation. It’s more than the facts and the spec.

An historian looks at the world adopting an non-judgmental stance towards the facts.

A preservationist adopts a deferential stance towards the world

What we are talking about in the Essence of Work is the “Artist’s Way” of looking at the world.

“This is what an artist does. She must defamiliarize herself with her everyday perceptions, which depend on—are conditioned by—her past experiences, including the experience of inhabiting a world that is thoroughly conventional. She has to try to perceive as a baby does, or as the empiricist supposes we all do, but this is a subtle and extraordinary accomplishment. There is nothing infantile about good art, but it does show us the world as viewed by a consciousness that has, for a spell, liberated itself from conventionality” (from the World beyond your head…)

Craftsmanship, Historical Coherence, Musicality, Authentic Observation, and Creating The Dance between host and guest are critical components of the Essence of Work.

Like this:

This post is part-1 of a series of ten essays on the essence of work. For an introduction, check here.

How many times does it happen to you that you say/think:

“They don’t get it,

they really don’t get it!”

This happens to me when sharing ideas about my work as an event creator, or should I say “créateur d’expériences”, like Renaults famous advertising tag line: “créateur d’automobiles” which is quite different than “car manufacturer”. The elegance of the French language of course helps.

I keep on trying to explain that we are not in the events business, that we are in the business of creating high quality feedback loops to enable immersive learning experiences, and my employer keeps calling what we do “events”. I have come to a point where I stop trying to explain, and just do.

Part of this “not-getting-it” is probably due to a different (therefore not better or worse) vocabulary used by business people and creative people. But most of the non-connection is there because we live in, are inspired by a different belief system.

The subject of belief systems really started resonating with me when I discovered a video of Dave Gray’s presentation “Liminal Thinking: Sense-Making for systems in large organizations”, his closing keynote at Enterprise UX 2015 Conference.

Dave Gray is author of the fantastic “The Connected Company” and many more, and there is a fair chance that his next book will include “Liminal Thinking” in its title. Dave is a good fried, and he shared with me a preview of his next book.

I read it and gave some feedback, so I believe I really have internalized his message. In respect of Dave’s work, nothing in this post is a cut and past from his preview edition, I just distilled it from the public video.

The core message in the video/book is that of the “Self-Sealing Bubble”. The bubble of a belief system, the bubble where one is only receptive to the obvious, the belief system, the DNA that the organization has been trained for, and sometimes like in religions, brainwashed for.

Where it becomes even more interesting is when Dave starts connecting needs, beliefs and actions.

To be more precise:

“Needs create beliefs that create rules for action”

And if my need is not fulfilled, I will create a belief, a story that will give reason for my actions, also called rationalising.

“Why are we here?”

asks Dave, and his answer is the mind-blowing “To meet our needs and to help others meet their needs”. Wow!

Say that again.

“To meet our needs and to help others meet their needs”

The model presented, can also be used for reverse engineering of needs in case of conflict of belief systems: what would I do if I believed in the belief system of the other party? What would happen if I act as if that belief system were true? What if I would adapt, even fake my behaviour to give the other belief system a chance.

To give the other belief system a chance

is sometimes also called

an “experiment”

But giving the other belief system a chance, is very different than changing your needs. Dave does not recommend you change your needs.

On the contrary. And he leads to a very interesting reflection whether security is at all possible at work.

For me security at work would mean to have

“an environment where nothing needs to be protected”

An environment where the quality level of “being a group”, being a team is such that there is no competition between team members, where there are no egos, where there are no posers, losers, clueless and Sociopath pathologies as described in the magic post by Venkatesh Rao “Executive Engagement”.

Where there no classes and hierarchies, and where everybody is respected for the value and insights they bring to the table. And classes is not only about hierarchies. A class could also be associating people with the past, and isolating them deliberately from the future thinking.

An environment without organizational pathologies or self-conforming belief systems.

“Most enterprises are not emotionally safe places”, says Dave Gray, and he is unfortunately so damn right.

In many organizations, people are encouraged to leave their emotions at the door.

“But that is impossible”

It even is more impossible when you get promoted in senior leadership positions, where it really gets schizophrenic, and nobody dares to challenge you. Where most will say yes or whatever latest buzzword to please and charm and schmooze you.

“The more senior, the more difficult it is to leave your emotions at the door, because everybody else will conform to your self sealing logic, and your needs will always get met”

But the key lesson learned from Dave Gray keynote for me is to go and search and discover my deeper needs for a healthy functioning of myself in and outside the organization.